Film Review: T2 Trainspotting @ VUE Cardiff

Nostalgia is felt strongly and fiercely in the follow up of the Danny Boyle classic, Trainspotting.

Widely acknowledged as the best film to ever come out of Scotland, the 1996 classic is still as much an influence now as it was when it first came out. Few films instilled energy so profound in an audience while presenting scenes of sex and drugs and violence. You were addicted in a heartbeat, to the frisky characters of Spud, Sick Boy, Begbie and Renton. I walked into the screening thinking, “It isn’t actually going to be better than the first”.

But it was.

Almost, and perhaps even unparalleled. T2 encapsulated the unrelenting pace I expected, plus more. Profane yet musical, violent yet hypnotising, the now middle aged boys we had grown to love (albeit colossal flaws) were now – exactly that. Middle aged, but still sprinting through the streets of Edinburgh as if twenty years had never passed. A ballad of obscurity, Renton had ran and returned just as he had been all that time ago – unsure and yearning for familiarity. Even though he had begun a life elsewhere, he had come home to the fringes of society where he truly belongs.

T2 is certainly darker than the former, taking an honest and melancholic lens to ageing. Gaping holes of people who had come and gone were shown with harsh reality, such as Tommy or Renton’s mother and even Dawn. The shock factor that instilled the first Trainspotting to be a cult classic is not quite the same now, as seeing these men with their lives slipping away underneath their noses is arguably harder to watch than dead babies crawling on ceilings.